Slashdot Mirror
PC Games Go To Boot Camp
1up has taken several of the more popular recent PC titles to Apple Boot Camp, and report back on how they handle the MacBook Pro hardware. From the article: "With all settings on medium, F.E.A.R. is absolutely playable. Again, none of the silky-smooth 60 fps that hardware freaks clamor for, but it looks good and plays well even with tons of characters onscreen. Annoyingly, F.E.A.R. offers a really pitiful selection of resolutions, all of which are constrained to the old-fashioned 4:3 aspect ratio -- meaning that play on the MacBook's widescreen is stretched, and kind of ugly. That's not a hardware issue so much as limited programming, and presumably anyone with a widescreen PC is in the same pickle."
Nice article but I dont know why any one would want to game on a laptop. With the screen and keyboard so close together thats a back problem waitign together. I would like to see how the mac desktops size up adainst say a dell or HP desktop.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
... But why should the widescreen folk have a better view than the 4:3 folk? Imagine playing a game online, and you have a 4:3 screen. It's great, it looks good. But then someone else you are playing against has a 16:9 widescreen and he sees not only what you are able to see, but more (on the sides). So his 'character' has a better peripheral vision because he has a widescreen monitor?
Blame the industry for lack of foresight, meanwhile, me and my widescreens will enjoy the extra peripheral viewspace.
To note though, I have a PowerPC Mac with widescreen, and got the Doom3 demo, and I had to bump up the POV in order to not get a "stretched" image. Meaning the resolution was widened but the angle of view was still the same as an unstretched monitor.
In this case, everyone is able to set the POV to the same values that I am, and the Doom-engined games have long allowed servers to restrict POV ranges, since people could set these to very high values, adjust to them, and thus end up being able to see out the sides of their heads.
Having the widescreen stretch the view out seems like less of a programming issue and more of a gamer-fairness issue.
If one is actually concerned about this "fairness" issue, then Macs have offered for a long time a resolution where it is not stretched, but rather the standard resolution centered in the middle of the screen. This looks a HECK of a lot better than a stretched resolution, where people look fat, and distorted.
Also, again the same point as above, anyone can adjust POV angles in the games that support it, so if you're willing to deal with a distorted image, you can have the same POV range as I do.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
is a new idea, but I don't get the hubbub. Once Apple switched to Intel, they began churning out typical x86 PC's. Yeah, they look cooler, but why would anyone expect that they would bench/perform differently from a generic white box with the same specs? This seems to be much ado about nothing. It's great that the Apple computers have the secret DRM chip that allows for OS X x8 to be installed, the dual boot option may make this a great option for for some folks. But to bench them and remark with wonder about the results compared to any of a bijillion other Intel hardware based Windows PC's seems odd.
I installed Boot Camp last week, and other than some issues with some older games running too fast or not correctly measuring the speed of the processor, it worked great. I ran out and bought Oblivion, and it installed and runs great. I found the same issues as those in the article, but they are easaily resolved with some very minor tweaking. I don't really consider myself a gamer, but I was inpressed with the distance cueing limits, etc. and the frame rate was good. I was able to play four several hours and the only problem I found was that if you have anti-aliasing on the Oblivion Gates slow the framerate right down when they are on screen. Keep it on the default HDR setting and everything is fine.
Handy link to the Widescreen Gaming Forum website. It includes a listing of games that work with widescreen monitors, including hacks, patches, and workarounds to get games that don't natively support them to work.
This guy's the limit!
If you pump up the clock with ATITool, frame rates jump 30-50% (at the cost of your Mac being unseemly noisy and warm).
Now you just need some blue neon - and maybe a carbon fiber spoiler on top - to give your iMac that Real Ultimate (gaming) Power! (tm)
So his 'character' has a better peripheral vision because he has a widescreen monitor?
Imagine a gamer with a great video card and monitor. With the better resolution and size he can make out objects that are further away. Shouldn't all games be restricted to 640x480 and at a certain size on the screen, otherwise some characters can see further and in better detail than others. Some people might have two monitors allowing them to reference a map, IM with other players, or view cheats at the same time as the game. Games need to detect and turn off multiple monitors. Also, some gamers use joysticks and trackball setups that allow them to click buttons faster. Games should only support standard keyboards and mice; lest some characters have better reaction times than others.
You could argue this for all sorts of hardware, but it does not really matter. People who spend more on the best hardware and connection will gain some slight advantage. That's life. In any case failing to deal with widescreen monitors and distorting the picture is pathetic. I thought all games checked for this and at worst put some black bars on the right and left, like the ones at the top and bottom for widescreen movies on a standard TV.
Of course its a older game, but its much more prossesor heavy than you would think based on how SE botched up the coding for PC.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Well, even beyond that, why would you possibly use a hard-coded list of specific resolutions, however long?
As soon as you support more than one resolution, you (or your libraries) already need to handle scaling and talking about your polygons in portion-of-display units rather than number-of-pixels units. That work is already done, so why limit yourself to any number of specific resolutions, rather than just scaling to whatever pixel count and aspect ratio the display happens to have?
Do you really think that you can predict now the specs of every display that any person is ever going to use to run your game at any time in the future? This is nearly as absurd as people who chain their website design to absolute numbers of pixels.
Cabel (of the Mac software shop Panic) has put up a quicktime video of Half-Life 2 running on his Intel iMac. In two words, it looks friggin sweet:
http://cabel.name/
(With apologies to his hosting provider.)
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
After all, you have a triumverate of "evil" going on here. After all, it is an Apple machine with Intel chips running Microsoft software.
A friend and I were talking about this very issue recently. While I tend to agree that PC games should be entirely flexible in terms of resolution (since there are far too many display options and aspect ratios available), I realized that there was one factor which could be important to a game developer: Preserving the cinematic intent of the game. For example, if a game is supposed to surprise you by attacking from behind, it can't really have a third-person viewpoint available. The same could be true in a 4:3 versus 16:9/16:10 situation in that the level/game designer might want to constrain the viewpoint to 4:3 in order to cause a sense of claustrophobia while enemies are off to the sides just out of vision.
:)
In a similar vein, I could see where some people operating with their 17" 4:3 screen in a multiplayer "twitch" environment could be upset that their opponent is getting a much wider view on their 23" 16:10 screen. Then again, that kind of issue has been in play for a while now with the potentially large disparity between video cards/monitors and their available resolutions (i.e., someone at 1600x1200 on a 21" screen is going to be able to see better than someone at 800x600 on a 15" screen.).
Of course, if the only reason a developer puts limitations on resolution is because of bad programming, then that's no kind of excuse.
All the people crying that Boot Camp means the end of OS X gaming need to remember a certain reality: no software company with any sense will shut down a business unit that remains consistently profitable. So long as native OS X versions of software continue to bring in money for the companies that create them (Aspyr, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.), they'll stick around.
So the question is, would enough people keep using native OS X apps, thereby maintaining that profitability? I'd say yes, and I'd also say that Boot Camp really won't have much of an overall effect beyond increasing the Mac's market share slightly (and only slightly, because setting up dual-booting is an extra cost in terms of the XP license and the time involved to make it happen); Boot Camp is aimed at people for whom Windows is the exception, not the rule - i.e. people that always use native OS X apps if they're available. I honestly don't see this radically changing anything.
The coolest voice ever.
If that were the case, then they would leave the resolution set to what it is (preferably native, but that is the user's choice) and just use a 4:3 chunk in the middle. Instead, they change resolution to their 4:3, non-native one and leave the screen looking like crap. If they cared about the quality of the experience, they've just ruined it far more than allowing a widescreen view would have. There have been widescreen monitors now for over half a decade. At this point, it is just lazy programming.
Weird, I never had trouble with 4:3 resolutions on my 8:5 HP f2105 monitor, I find it odd that Apple failed to include options such as the following on their wonderful hardware:
Notebooks don't have on screen displays for LCD settings.
But ignoring that, Apple's hardware and OS properly support their displays, making the OSD controls you mention unnecessary.
In other words, you're asking why Apple doesn't have kludgey workarounds for a problem that doesn't exist on the Mac. It's not Apple's fault for not including unnecessary hacks, it's Windows'/F.E.A.R.'s fault that they need them.
In case you're wondering, this is what Mac users mean by "it just works". Why should a person have to worry about something the computer is fully capable of correctly doing itself?
They are there. Those are options in the drivers for ATI cards at least. The difference betwen Windows and OS X is that that latter offers control for such features outside of the driver.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Sure. Like Apple doesn't work with ATI or Nvidia on any of it's drivers.
Apple supports a small subsection of hardware. Windows runs on a vast selection of hardware. I don't see this as being particularly comparable.
And I really wish you would tell the Mac users at my office that I support that it "just works" because they call me for support when it "just isn't working".
I use and work with OS X. It's a decent OS but it has it's problems and this bullshit "it just works" crap is getting seriously tired. It's like that "insanely great" crap all over again.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
"It's not the driver's job to decide whether or not to scale the video. It's the OS's job to tell the driver what to do (and, optionally, the application's job to ask the OS to scale or not)."
."For most hardware, you just plug it in and "it just works"."
So let me get this straight - it's the OS's responsibility to tell the underlying hardware what features it has? Even though the hardware may or may not support the feature? I be to differ. The driver on Windows exposes the hardware capabilities of the device to the operating system. So you don't have a situation where you have Windows attempting to force a 10 year old VGA card to do widescreen. You'd never have this problem on a Mac because you don't have to worry about old hardware. It's very easy for Apple to have the OS contain all of the information about any hardware it might need to run - after all Apple controls exactly that.
I would change that to "for some hardware you just plug in and it just works most of the time except for when it doesn't".
Let me tell you a story about the Editorial department at a magazine a work for. We recently moved them up to OS X and guess what? All their digital voice recorders (USB devices) stopped working. Apparently there is no OS X support for them. And they are only about a year old. Wheee. It just didn't work and just hasn't worked and the staff has to just go out and buy new ones that do.
Or the staff member that was taking pictures on their digital camera and tried to move it to the Production Macintosh. Oops, no Mac support for that camera. It just didn't work. Had to plug it into a PC to extract the photos. Now by my analysis the camera manufacturer would be to blame, but by your's it's obviously the fault of Apple since the OS should handle this automagically! After all it "just works" with other cameras why doesn't it "just work" with this one? Of course the Production camera's work because we bought them specifically to be Mac compatible, but really shouldn't the OS support any camera by your logic?
Or maybe you can explain to my friend who ran a recent Apple update after which his wireless card no longer works? Would that be "just used to work"?
Do you realize how abysmally ignorant you sound spouting a marketing catch phrase over and over again? Do you work with Macs? I have 40 of them onsite here and have seen them screw the pooch often enough to realize that although the OS is good it has it's problems. It does not always "just work" and sometimes fixing the problem is far from trivial. Try dealing with font management on OS X in a print production environment. Holy shit I have I seen some weirdness.
It's impossible to have a reasonable conversation about OS X or Macs in general because of this whole starry eyed "it just works" oh thanks my savior Jobs viewpoint.
I've used Macs professionally for 16 years and am well versed in the good and bad points. Stop drooling on your MacBook and acting like an Apple marketing programmed robot.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
These benchmarks of Windows games running on XP on an Intel Mac are all very interesting - I mean who would have thought that a standard Intel laptop with an Apple logo on it would have performance roughly equivalent to a standard Intel laptop without an Apple logo on it?
But so far no-one seems to have gotten around to benchmarking the Intel Mac running a cross platform game under both Windows and OSX.
I just don't understand that. Is it possible that OSX would score too highly and the Apple crowd don't want to embarass the Windows users? That's got to be it.